Colleges are facing a growing deferred-maintenance problem, which at many public institutions adds up to repair bills in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Sometimes state legislatures have not supported those colleges at levels needed to maintain campus infrastructure. But at the same time, colleges continue to expand their campuses even as they have trouble maintaining the buildings they already have. Now that a multibillion-dollar stimulus bill is moving through Congress in the latest attempt to bail out a faltering economy, the lawmakers and pundits who seemed to be asleep at the wheel over the past decade are suddenly gripped by the virtue of fiscal responsibility and are criticizing parts of the bill that they find wasteful. The author cautions that higher-education administrators may soon find this newfound righteousness and ire pointed in their direction, focusing on $7-billion that colleges hope to get for renovation, improvements, and energy-efficiency projects as symbolic of the national inability to live within our means.